How I made my first million : 26 self-made millionaires reveal the secrets to their success

a
Ndrew
 c
arSwell
GolDen ruleS
1. Save, save, save.
2. Enjoy the ride. Enjoy yourself along the way, 
and don’t be too conservative.
3. believe in yourself and your research. Don’t 
listen to other p eople trying to give you short-
cuts and get- rich schemes. Stick with what you 
know.
4. Champion those around you. I find that if I make 
the franchisees happy, that filters down through 
their businesses.
5. Have confidence. At the end of the day, money 
is just an idea backed by confidence.

---

The Unbreakable
Bond
Peter Bond
linc energy; 
established 1996 
and listed 2006; 110 
employees; market 
capitalisation: $1.68 billion
Peter Bond made his first 
million dollars selling 
muck. It was dirty, discarded muck, unwanted 
because at the time nobody thought you could 
sell it. But Bond had other ideas.
In 1985, the truck driver’s son from Camden, 
in western Sydney, returned from a couple of 
weeks’ holiday to find that his partner had shut 
Photo: L
yndon Mechielsen

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THE UNbREAKAbLE bOND 55
down their freight business and sold all the gear. 
Fifteen thousand dollars in debt and with no 
job, Bond needed an idea fast. He knew his ex- 
partner had the contract to remove coal spilled 
during unloading operations at the Balmain 
coal loader. He also knew where the coal was 
dumped. And he had exactly what was needed to 
turn this dumped filth into a buck: a sharp mind, 
the capacity for hard yakka, and a rake.
Bond, better known today as the founder and 
majority owner of 
$
1.65 billion alternative- 
energy prospect Linc Energy, had found his 
opportunity. ‘In those days they used to clean 
up coal from the coal loaders and take it away,’ 
Bond recalls. ‘They considered it contaminated 
and wouldn’t load it back onto the ship. My 
former partner was taking it from the Balmain 
coal loader and dumping it at a quarry at Kemps 
Creek.’ So Bond asked the quarry manager if he 
could take the coal. Unsurprisingly, the manager 
said yes.
Suddenly the broke kid had a product. Now he 
just needed a market. ‘I knew hospitals used coal, 
and I knew brick plants used it,’ he says, so he got 
on the phone. ‘I’m talking to this guy trying to 
convince him to buy it, and he obviously knew 
I didn’t know what I was talking about. He basi-
cally told me to f*** off and learn the business 

---

56 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
before I rang him back.’ Bond had a head start, 
having worked for a couple of years as a trainee 
metallurgist at BHP’s Port Kembla steelworks. 
He raked up the muck himself and found he had 
1000 tonnes. ‘I figured about 17 bucks a tonne 
would see me clear.’ Finally, he found a buyer. 
‘When I got the cheque, I thought, This is the 
business I want to be in.’
Today that business is like no other.
Bond wants to use the gas locked in the vast 
underground coal seams in Queensland to make 
super- clean diesel and aviation fuels. Linc Energy 
is worth more than 
$
1 billion and his personal 
stake, a fraction over 50 per cent, makes him one 
of the most successful of the new energy and 
resources entrepreneurs. When this book went 
to press, Bond’s demonstration plant at Chin-
chilla was on the verge of being activated and, 
if he can get diesel flowing cheaply, efficiently 
and consistently, then Bond might just become 
Australia’s richest man.
Turning underground coal gas into liquid 
fuels is a long way from raking up spilled coal. 
But every good story requires that the hero 
overcome adversity before he earns his reward. 
The week Bond was paid for that 1000 tonnes 
he raked together, the Maritime Services Board 
put up the Balmain coal- loading contract for 

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THE UNbREAKAbLE bOND 57
tender. Bond bid for it and won, beating all 
rivals—including the erstwhile colleague who’d 
left him unemployed. It was a start, but it wasn’t 
long before the young man got his next lesson 
in business.
Some of his clients couldn’t help noticing 
that their coal- hauler looked as if he lived in 
his truck. ‘They said, “We love your cheap coal, 
but can you go and get your own house?” ’ he 
recalls. ‘I was borrowing their front- end loader 
and borrowing a cup of milk . . . it was second-
hand, shoestring stuff. They said, “Can you go 
and get your own coal yard and actually have a 
business?” ’ Once again, Bond’s talent for seeing 
value in the discarded came to the fore.
That first yard was an abandoned site next to 
the coal rail depot at Glenleigh, near Camden. 
The site belonged to the now defunct Clutha 
coal company. So Bond spoke to someone at 
Clutha and got the go- ahead to move in. ‘Unbe-
known to me, it wasn’t actually their land or their 
coal, but they’d been asked to get rid of the coal 
because it was a fire hazard,’ he says. So Bond 
made the coal dump his own. ‘That’s where I 
used to park the truck and screen the coal, and 
that’s where I made my empire.’ Like the quarry 
at Kemps Creek, this corner of wasteland was 
covered with a deep layer of the kind of dross 

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58 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
Peter Bond could turn into a quid. ‘They had 
actually dumped quite a few thousand tonnes of 
coal there, and it was quite good quality,’ Bond 
says. ‘I started with a rake in 1985, and by 1989 I 
was a millionaire.’
But there was no posturing. In fact, Bond let 
the milestone pass in silence: ‘I paid the house 
off and the car, and there was money in the bank, 
but I didn’t even tell my wife.’
Bond decided washing coal was the next step 
in expanding his business and that the way to do 
it was with a mobile coal washery, which he says 
was the first of its kind in Australia. Maybe that’s 
why it almost sent 
him broke again. ‘I’d 
basically bet the mil-
lion bucks I’d made 
on it and we were 
just breaking even,’ Bond says. The problem with 
breaking even was that he had debt—and it was 
the early 1990s. The credit crisis arrived, com-
plete with double- digit interest rates. It was a 
period and an experience that permanently col-
oured Bond’s view of Australian banks. ‘Out of 
that, I have no loyalty to any bank,’ he says. ‘The 
only exception, and it’s going to sound strange, 
was General Electric. I was in debt to GE Money 
[the company’s banking arm], and they were the 
‘
‘
I started with a rake in 
1985, and by 1989 I was a 
millionaire.

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THE UNbREAKAbLE bOND 59
only ones who stood by me. Each time they refi-
nanced me they did it without kicking me with 
another 
$
50,000 or whatever. So the biggest and 
supposedly most brutal bank in the world was in 
fact the best.’
With the help of the Americans Bond clung 
on, trying to wring a profit from his coal wash-
eries. Then came the really big break: a telegram 
from an old mate at BHP. ‘He’d seen an article 
about my mobile plants,’ Bond says. ‘They signed 
me up to a contract to wash the coal at Appin 
colliery, behind Wollongong.’ A year later, Bond 
and his new business partner were making a 
c ouple of million dollars a year in profit.
They bought a couple of coal mines, includ-
ing one for about 
$
3 million that they later sold 
for many times that sum. But by 2002, Bond had 
had enough. He sold everything and went and 
sat on a beach in Fiji. He was seeking enlight-
enment. For a time he wore a Buddhist monk’s 
saffron robe, but he drew the line at shaving 
his head. He listened to self- actualisation gurus 
like Anthony Robbins. He listened to Donald 
Trump, too. Back at home, he got the odd phone 
call. P eople wanted him to turn assets around.
Eventually, someone brought him the Linc 
story. He discussed it with his wife and she told 
him to go for it.

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60 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
If all goes well, you can forget about this story. 
There’ll be a better one about Peter Bond—the 
one about how he made his first billion.